How Bono's daughter Eve Hewson tapped into her music instincts for Flora and Son role

When you're Bono's daughter, people have a lot of expectations about what kind of musician you might be.

Such expectations have long followed Eve Hewson, who has made a name for herself as an actress far from the shadow of her U2 frontman father. But now she confronts those expectations head-on in Flora and Son, a musical drama about Flora, a single mother who connects with her teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan) when she learns to play guitar and write music. The film, streaming now on AppleTV, also stars Jack Reynor as her musician-ex and Joseph Gordon Levitt as Flora's guitar teacher, Jeff.

"I don't think she has ever thought of herself as a singer," reflects writer-director John Carney, famous for his previous musical dramas Once and Begin Again. "She was never going to try and put her hand over the handprint of her dad in the cement. Never. And she's right because he is one of the greatest rock voices of many, many decades."

"Unless she's a fully committed singer or singer-songwriter, you're not going to go near that," Carney continues. "And yet she had the courage and confidence to go near this part because she understood that it's not about her being an amazing singer or anything like that. She didn't need to be a great singer, but she can hold a tune. She's got a perfectly nice voice. But I don't think the movie is about her being a fab singer."

For his part, Carney didn't know Hewson had chosen to pursue acting until his agent flagged the actor's interest in Flora and Son. In advance of the film's release, we called up Carney to talk about Hewson, what inspired his latest music-driven story, and more.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: All of your films have ties to music, but what inspired this one?

JOHN CARNEY: So I'm walking down a Dublin Street and I pass a skip, which is a dumpster, and it's got lots of stuff in it — rubble and carpets and bits of wire. And there was an amplifier, a small little practice amp that somebody was throwing out. I took it home, fixed it up, and I played it and it worked. And I thought, there's something in that idea of what would that mean to me if I didn't have an amplifier already. I have a bunch of amplifiers, so it didn't mean that much, but if I didn't have money, if I didn't have an amplifier, it would probably be quite significant. That struck a chord with me, if you excuse the pun. And then I thought: Let's have it not be an amplifier, let's have it be a guitar. And that was the original image I had for the movie was somebody pulling a guitar out of the rubble and saving it from the landfill, but also being saved by it.

Zoom and virtual communication are central to the plot. Was that inspired by COVID-19 and the lockdown experience?

It wasn't inspired by COVID, but it was certainly facilitated by it. I had come up with the idea before COVID because I think that nowadays you wouldn't go and knock on somebody's door for guitar lessons. You'd go online. Then, COVID happened and we were all online — that was what I needed to finish the script, which was this sense of, you're never going to fall in love with somebody over a screen in L.A. — that's preposterous. But because we got so used to Zoom, it at least opened up the question in our minds of, could you? We became these weird people with these screens. And that gave me the little extra bit of permission I needed to make that a large part of the movie.

You've worked with musicians who weren't really actors and actors who weren't really musicians, but Eve is the daughter of rock royalty. Was that why you wanted her for this role?

No, I didn't really know that she was an actor. I mean, I had met her once when she was a kid. My wife and I saw her in something and thought she was terrific, but I didn't think I had anything that might appeal to her. Then her agent rang me when I sent him Flora and said, "You should think about Eve." So I did a Zoom with her and it became apparent over that call that she was a match made in heaven for Flora. She made the Zoom call feel like anybody else coming after the Zoom call wouldn't be her. I got off the call saying, "Well, now it has to be her." She made good on that promise. She really did choke the hell out of that part every day.

What did she do that made you feel that way?

She made me realize that I wasn't going to get the same level of insight that she had into the character [from anyone else]. She said from the beginning, "If I do this, I would do it really funny. She's f---ing hilarious, this character." And I was like, "Well, I think she's funny, but that's interesting that you think she's really funny. For a woman to be funny is the most appealing thing because we're taught so much about poise and beauty, but when you can laugh with somebody, you just have to love her. It's such an appealing thing to see.

Did Eve's parentage come up in terms of discussing the role of music in your life or how music is important within a family and those themes that are here in this film?

Not directly in terms of the part, but she has a good instinct for the type of storytelling that I'm doing. Part of being a good actor is, really experienced actors know how the thing is going to turn out when they're doing it and they can tell you how it's going to go. People like Mark Ruffalo will say, "That's not going to work. Trust me, in a year's time, you're going to be editing that, it's going to be a problem." Or Anne Hathaway, she knows so much about how this is going to be when it's out there, so don't do it that way. Eve has that, even though she doesn't have the experience of those type of actors.

She has it because the family is involved in music, being a big rock band with amazing people coming to the house having arguments and stories and debates about music. She has a helpful sixth sense of, it's not going to play. Performers need to know, "I can't sing that song. I'm a rock singer. I'm not going to try and do a jazz ballad in the middle of my set. I know what I can do, and that's not going to play." She had an interesting instinct for her strengths and what she wouldn't or couldn't do, but it was a bit of a rock star approach to it and less of a studied actor thing, which I appreciated. Making this film was a bit like me and Joe [Gordon-Levitt] and Eve were in a band together for a few weeks.

To your mind, do your characters exist in the same world? Is there a universe in which Flora and Max will jam with the characters from Once or Begin Again?

Not really. No, I don't think so. I can't see practically how their lives would cross.

Sing Street was supposed to open on Broadway right before the COVID shutdown. Any updates on it coming back to either New York or London's West End?

I hope so. It's hard to know right now. After the pandemic, we were all changed a little bit. We're 20 percent more nuts, but we're also 20 or 30 percent more reluctant to ever risk having a bad night or go out to a restaurant and not get exactly what we wanted. We've become a bit crazy, and it'll take a while to recover from that idea that we might be surprised by something or it might fail a little bit, and that's okay. People want to have the "Broadway experience." With Sing Street, we don't want to give you the "Broadway experience." We give you an experience on Broadway. But that's what people loved about Once on Broadway. People love to be surprised, but we're a bit scared now after being in our houses for so long.

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